Unofficial news and tips about Google

January 17, 2009

Upcoming Gmail Features: Contact Deduplicator, Better Video Chat

Gmail's Product Manager Todd Jackson told CNet some of the Gmail features that will be released in the next months, but hopefully the best new things are still secret.

The video chat plug-in for Gmail will show higher-quality videos and this is one of the reasons why Google chose not to use Flash. "Jackson says the plug-in route will be able to provide even higher-quality video as people's connections improve, going to Video Graphics Array (640x480 pixels) all the way up to high definition."

Gmail's contact manager will add a feature that's even in Hotmail, not to mention some business-oriented mail clients: removing duplicates. "Jackson says a de-duper is on the way and that contacts will have more of a presence both in your inbox and in conversations."

Regarding email attachments, CNet suggests that Gmail could increase the already generous limit of 20 MB, but Gmail's Product Manager hints at something else. "We know people's file sizes are getting bigger. They want to share their files, keep them in the cloud, and not worry about which computer they're on. Google wants to be solving these problems."

19 comments:

Contact Deduplicator, yay!! Finally... Now when will they allow us to get a contact's email address (copy it to the clipboard) without having to start composing a message, or going to the contacts manager? The quick search in the chat box is soooo close to that... But for some reason it is impossible to select the emails that show up in the floating results. That makes it even more frustrating...

there is indeed cut-backs in google's service provision recently, most noticable the user limit in new Apps sign-ups on standard edition..and also remember a de-duper will save google's cloud space also

I wish I could remove attachments from emails. Presently you can't, you have to either delete the message itself, or reply to the message to yourself so you capture the message contents but without the attachment and then trash the original message.

About contacts, i'm just thinking that it would be great to add automatically into your gmaps account a private map with markups for all your contacts having adresses filled in gmail contacts. And in the contact description, a small map to show the place, would be perfect.

The same kind of private maps could be added for events (with location) created in your google calendar...

Man, I can't wait for the contact de-duplicator. I've got a huge contact list and it's a pain to keep it updated. I'd also like to see an option to get better pictures displayed in emails. With a large contact list, it's easier for visual communicators to see a face/icon and know what they're dealing with.

PLEASE add separate fields for contacts: first name, last name, company, and for the address: street, city, state, zip code. I no longer attempt to sync my gmail contacts via goosync with my pda because the names appear reversed (especially company names) and the addresses are duplicated. I now manually change something in each program. Every other email client has these fields; if google wants to allow people the capability of syncing their contacts, this should be a top priority.